Stop judging me because I want to be a journalist

You get it all the time, the “future” question. It’s surprising how many strangers are apparently interested in what we’d like to do after uni, career-wise. Like all students, I’m used to being asked about my future plans pretty regularly by everyone from nosey neighbours, to fellow students, to the woman in the bus queue trying to make casual conversation.

Most people can get away with replying with a vague, offhand: “Something to do with adveritising”, or perhaps: “Something to do with finance”, which sparks such little interest in the inquirer that the conversation blissfully ends there.

But for journalism students, the future is the topic of dread:

“You want to be a journalist? Ah, so you’re into snooping into other people’s business, are you?”

“Journalism? So I’m guessing you’re quite a nosey person?”

“I’d better keep my phone well away from you, then!”

All of these responses are usually accompanied by the appropriate cheeky grin, and sometimes even a wink, but it doesn’t lessen the annoying truth behind these jokey statements – Journalists are stereotyped as being big-nosed, meddling, eavesdropping snoops, who cause more trouble than they do good and often find themselves on the wrong side of the law because of it.

We don’t want to hack your mobile phones

When I try to explain to said accuser that that’s not the sort of journalist I plan to be, they look at me with a disbelieving, raised-eyebrows sort of expression, and say something that usually follows the lines of: “There’s another type of journalism? What’s that then?” And then they laugh flippantly like they’ve not just seriously offended me on a personal level.

What the people of the general public don’t seem to realise is that this stereotype applies to a very small portion of Journalists who are willing to take that extra step to get a good scoop. There’s plenty of ways to find promising news stories without having to rely on prying into somebody else’s business when it’s not your place to do so.

It’s not cool to immediately judge journalism students on our career choices, especially as you’ll probably end up unknowingly reading online articles by us, listening to us on the radio for entertainment, or keeping updated by watching us report on the news in the future.

I can’t even work a computer half the time

When I decided to follow the journalism career path, not once did I do it with plans to badger people with questions until they were forced to put a restraining order on me, exaggerate the truth and maybe even tell lies, bribe members of the police, or hack into technology in order to extract personal details, just so that I could get that good piece of gossip.

We don’t get taught in lectures how to hack into a mobile phone. We don’t learn the best ways to pressure information out of somebody or how to be manipulative to get your own way. We learn to find news from simply walking down the street, because that way, we’ll never have to take the above extra steps as a last resort.

Believe it or not, the majority of journalists would only ever dream of producing news fairly, and, more importantly, legally.

But until the rest of society figures this one out, I’ll continue to dread the future question just for the grief it brings me.